Add to that the fact that many stories online are ghost-written [often without the author being told] and that most writers are just filling word quotas with guff. That's often why when you want a specific piece of information from an article, you'll find the only useful part is one or two sentences which are buried under four or five paragraphs of tripe.
Source: being a freelance writer.
EDIT: quite a funny example is when I was asked to ghost-write an article for someone else who was an "expert" in starting businesses. I have no idea how to start a business but I pulled in a load of stuff in from around the internet and whammo, pro business-starting advice article. It was put under his name so that other people could learn from his long period of 'expertise'. But nope, it was me and I don't have a Danny LaRue. He didn't care, he just wanted clicks and for people to come to his website.
EDIT2: I was also asked to write a similar article for another woman. I looked her up and found that she had a history of scamming and child molestation. Still wrote it.
The part about only one or two sentences being useful is such a thing now, on opinion pieces essentially padded out with history rehash of the underlying "story" for entire first half (skip), then one sentence on what's actually happened recently of note (read), then comment from Gov department, business, interested party etc, which you always skip as it's simply a boiler plate response not addressing the part you read.
Generally speaking I read Sky, Guardian then random right wing nonsense people point out (Mail, Express..) or appear on my Google feed for laughs, mostly for an alternative reality take. I stopped reading the BBC a long time ago as a lot of the time they just didn't point out what the issue, controversy was about, neutral to the point irrelevant.